The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Has Disgraced the Entire Profession of Journalism

Reporters queue up to submit stories for Clinton approval as Team Hillary delivers dossier on unfriendly writer

We still don’t know the outcome of the 2016 election, in which our
“democratic process” has produced two candidates widely despised by the
American people, but we do know the race’s biggest loser: reporters and
the profession of journalism, which has been reduced to surrogacy,
largely on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Before going further, let me state that my own politics are on the
left but I won’t be voting in this election. Both parties have
collaborated to rig the system so that’s it’s virtually impossible for
an independent candidate to compete given the financial and
institutional hurdles that have been put in place to block such a
possibility. We live in an oligarchy where democracy is virtually
meaningless; I’m not debasing myself by participating in this charade.

Oligarchy - a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.

Several studies rank electoral integrity in the United States as the worst among Western democracies — for example, the one discussed here
— and this year’s campaign has made the United States an international
embarrassment. I’ve personally witnessed elections in Africa and Latin
America that had more legitimacy than the charade that will culminate
here next Tuesday. The idea of the United States lecturing foreign
countries about holding fair elections has long been dubious and is now
grotesque.

We have two unbelievably shitty candidates, neither of whom is fit to
lead the country.

Donald Trump is a reckless narcissist who, as his
debate performances indicated, cannot string together more than two
sentences, let alone articulate a coherent vision for the country’s
future. His remarks about women, Latinos and African-Americans are
reprehensible and, whether he believes his own statements or is merely
trying to stir up anger for his electoral benefit, have emboldened
people who hold retrograde and genuinely scary views.

Then there is Hillary Clinton, who has been in public life for
decades and who grows more and more unpopular upon exposure —and for
good reason. Whatever one thinks of the so-called “Servergate” scandal
—and I personally find it troubling that she put classified information
on a private server that was almost certainly obtained by foreign
intelligence services — she stonewalled and lied to the FBI during its
investigation, which has now been reopened. She and her family run a
foundation that aggressively solicited donations from corporations,
wealthy individuals and foreign governments that have interests before
the government, and in some cases Clinton, as secretary of state, took
actions that can only be seen as quid pro quo for big donors. These
facts alone should disqualify her from political life and make her the
legitimate target of criminal investigations.

After the FBI reopened its investigation, John Kass, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, cogently wrote in an opinion piece titled “Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside”:

Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and
continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal
investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations
and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls,
wringing her hands. The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to
step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the
nation were more important to them than power. And the American news
media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton’s political action committee — should begin demanding it.

Don’t bet on the best happening. It appears there may be a few late
Democratic defectors but Clinton is surrounded by a core group of amoral
supporters who, like her and her husband, lie without remorse or shame
and with such conviction that it appears they don’t know the difference
between fact and fiction. The truth is utterly irrelevant to the Clinton
crowd, as are the issues. All that matters is winning — as seen in
their rigging of the DNC to ensure Hillary’s nomination — and their continued ability to exploit public office for private gain.

It’s even less likely that the media, especially major outlets and
Washington political reporters who have all but openly worked on
Clinton’s behalf, will rethink their roles. This election has exposed as
never before that there is indeed a media elite, bound together by
class and geography, that is utterly clueless about its own biases and
filters.

A vast number of journalists covering the presidential campaign
are economically privileged brats that seem blissfully unaware that for
most Americans, the economy is in recession and people are terrified.If you don’t understand that, you can’t understand Trump.

That an
addled, reckless, dangerous billionaire is the last electoral hope to
tens of millions of Americans may be a sad reflection of the complete
breakdown of our political system, but it doesn’t make Trump’s appeal to
a significant chunk of the electorate illegitimate nor does it make all
of his supporters irrational morons and racists, as one gathers from
news accounts and liberal pundits.

The destruction of the industrial heartland due to Democratic-driven
trade policies, shrinking salaries that force many Americans to work two
and three jobs to support their families, the staggering rise in health
care costs under Obamacare, widespread economic insecurity that has
fueled a national opioid epidemic, and Hillary’s trigger-happy views
are highly rational reasons for any voter to consider casting a ballot
for Trump. So, too, are fears that Clinton’s election would lead to an
entrenchment of institutionalized corruption and corporate political
power. (If Hillary wins and Chuck Schumer takes over as Senate Majority
Leader, Wall Street will get its every dream through Congress.)

There’s nothing secret about the media’s anti-Trump stance. A formal
declaration of war was launched on August 7, when Jim Rutenberg, the New
York Times media columnist, wrote a story
under the headline, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in
Journalism.”

Rutenberg wrote that journalists were in a terrible bind
trying to stay objective because Trump, among other things, “cozies up
to anti-American dictators,” has “put financial conditions on the United
States defense of NATO allies,” and that his foreign policy views
“break with decades-old …consensus.” Rutenberg made clear that he and other reporters viewed “a Trump
presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous,” which required
them to report on him with a particularly critical point of view. This,
he said, would make journalists “move closer than you’ve ever been to
being oppositional,” which would be “uncomfortable and uncharted
territory.”

There are so many things wrong with all this that it’s hard to know
where to start. Rutenberg’s comment about dictators was clearly a
reference to Vladimir Putin, who is an authoritarian leader who Trump,
to his shame, admires. However, Russia is not the world’s worst
dictatorship — and has been far more effective at fighting ISIS than the
Obama administration — and Hillary’s cordial relationship with the
Saudi regime, to cite just one example, seems far more dangerous. But
rethinking “the alliances that have guided our foreign policy for 60
years” — the alliances that have resulted in non-stop war since 9/11 and
the U.S.’s current involvement in seven overseas conflicts — is not an
acceptable position for a presidential candidate in Rutenberg’s view.

Furthermore, how is it that the media has derogated to itself the
right to decide what candidates deserve special scrutiny and what
policies are acceptable? In a democracy, that is supposed to be the
voters’ job.

And worst of all is Rutenberg’s statement about the role of
journalists. “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say
should be believed,” I.F. Stone once wrote.“Journalism is printing what
someone else does not want printed: everything else is public
relations,” said George Orwell. For those two self-evident reasons,
being “oppositional” is the only place political journalists should ever
be, no matter who is in power or who is campaigning.

But for Rutenberg and the New York Times being oppositional
is only “uncomfortable” when it comes to covering Hillary Clinton. It
didn’t seem uncomfortable at all when it came to running a story about
Trump’s taxes based on three pages of a decades-old tax return that was
sent anonymously or when it ran another story with the headline, “The
282 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A
Complete List.”

All during the campaign we have watched Hillary Clinton rehearse
campaign themes and, almost as if by magic, the media amplifying those
themes in seeming lockstep. The hacked emails from Clinton campaign
chairman John Podesta have demonstrated that this was not mere
happenstance, but, at least in part, resulted from direct coordination
between the Clintonistas and the press.

Mark Leibovich of the Times magazine gave the Clinton campaign
significant input and review into a fawning profile of the candidate.
“Pleasure doing business!” campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri wrote
him at the conclusion of the process.

The Clintonistas had an equally pleasurable relationship with the
Times’s Maggie Haberman, who, it was said in one email, “We have had…
tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed.” Haberman
even apparently read Palmieri an entire story prior to publication “to
further assure me,” Palmieri wrote.

Ezra Klein, the boy wonder editor-in-chief of Vox, is considered to
be the campaign’s most reliable mouthpiece, as seen in a March 23, 2015
email in which Clintonistas were wondering which journalist it could
call upon to push out a campaign storyline they were then concocting. “I
think that person…is Ezra Klein,” wrote Palmieri. “And we can do it
with him today.”

In a July email, Neera Tanden, Hillary’s longtime friend, aide, and
attack puppet, strategized with Podesta about “recruiting brown and
women pundits” and pushing pro-Hillary media figures such as MSNBC’s
Joan Walsh and Klein’s colleague at Vox, Matthew Yglesias, to be even
more faithful stenographers. “They can be emboldened,” she wrote, as if
these two loyalist PR assets needed any further encouragement.

In the same email, Tanden wrote that when New York mayor Michael
Bloomberg was “having problems” with the Times he called publisher
Arthur Schulzburger [sic] to arrange a coffee to complain about the
newspaper’s reporting and that their chat “changed the coverage
moderately but also aired the issues in the newsroom so people were more
conscious of it.” Unfortunately, she added, “Arthur is a pretty big
wuss” so he wouldn’t do more to help out Bloomberg without additional
prodding. To get real results to change the Times’s coverage of the 2016
campaign, “Hillary would have to be the one to call” Sulzberger — a
rather astonishing remark that begs a million questions about the Times’
election reporting.

Wikileaks
revealed that Politico reporter Glenn Thrush, pictured here at July’s
Republican convention in Cleveland, sent an email to Hillary Clinton
campaign chairman John Podesta allowing him to review a story draft
before publication.

Politico reporter Glenn Thrush apologized to Podesta for writing a
story draft that he feared was too critical. “I have become a hack I
will send u the whole section that pertains to u,” he wrote. “Please
don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I fucked up anything.”
On bended knee would have been more dignified.

Trump’s threats to expand libel laws and to sue journalists are
genuinely scary, but Hillary displays similar contempt for journalists.
In September, she gave her first formal press conference in more than
nine months — virtually this entire presidential campaign.And as the
Podesta emails show, the Clintonistas happily work hand in glove with
pliant surrogates but operate in quite a different, and dishonest, way
with critics.

Which leads me to my own recent experience writing about the Clinton
Foundation’s abysmal programs in Colombia, where it has worked closely
with Frank Giustra, reportedly the foundation’s largest donor. Giustra, a
Canadian stock market manipulator who was known as the “Poison Dwarf”
because of his tiny stature — he’s a little north of 5 feet— and
tendency to make tons of money at the expense of small investors,
invested heavily in Colombia in oil, gold, and timber. He made a fortune while companies he was affiliated with ruthlessly exploited workers and reportedly raped and pillaged the environment.

The Clinton-Giustra partnership had been written about but no U.S.
journalists had traveled to Colombia to see what the Foundation has done
there. In fact, with few exceptions, the Clinton Foundation’s claims
about the good it has done overseas have been unexamined.

I spent 10 days in Colombia last May and spoke to unionists, workers,
environmentalists, Afro-Colombians and entrepreneurs — exactly the
people who the foundation brags about helping on its website— as well as
three left-leaning senators who champion the poor. They were
overwhelmingly negative, and in many cases disparaging, about the
Clinton Foundation and Giustra, who was deeply involved with an oil
company, Pacific Rubiales, that recently went spectacularly bankrupt and
which worked with the Army to smash a strike after workers revolted
over miserable pay and working conditions.

Bill Clinton had a friendly relationship with Pacific Rubiales too,
and in 2012 the two men golfed together at a charitable event for the
foundation sponsored by the oil company. Colombia’s president, whose
niece got a plush job as “Sustainability Manager” for Pacific Rubiales, golfed with Bill.

I had wanted to write the Colombia story for months but, as is often
the case in journalism today, couldn’t find a media outlet to pay for
the trip. A friend steered me to the American Media Institute (AMI), a
conservative non-profit, which funded the trip.

AMI arranged for the story to run in Politico, but it killed an early version. I then pitched it to Fusion, which ran it on
October 13.It immediately generated a furious reaction from the
Clinton camp, starting off with a series of tweets by Angel Urena, Bill
Clinton’s spokesman. Then the Foundation tried to get Fusion to take the
story off its website.

On October 14, Craig Minassian, a Clinton Foundation spokesman, sent a
14-page letter to Fusion, CC-ing foundation officials, Urena and Mark
Gunton of the Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership. The first few
pages attacked me, citing past articles about the Clinton Foundation and
a series of “vulgar” tweets I’d posted about Hillary Clinton and her
supporters, including Clinton’s long-time surrogate Joe Conason, author
of Man of the World, a rapturous book about Bill Clinton’s post-presidency. (Conason is also former executive editor of the Observer.)

It also complained about factual errors and cited the funding from
AMI as being evidence that the story was a right wing plot.In fact, I
set up the trip with the help of fixer in Colombia, picked people to
interview, and there was no political intrusion into the story.
Ironically, a conservative non-profit paid for a piece that defended
unions, the poor, women, and Afro-Colombians.

Mostly the dossier contained unverifiable Clinton Foundation
propaganda and references to positive press stories about the
foundation, like one in pro-Hillary Vox titled “The key question on the
Clinton Foundation is whether it saved lives. The answer is clearly
yes.” A central component of the foundation’s attack — which Urena
played heavily on his Twitter feed —was that I had never attempted to
reach the Clinton Foundation or campaign for comment.

Furthermore, I had “misled” the Foundation in the past so “we have
every reason to be suspicious of his intentions and doubt he would give
our facts a fair hearing,” he wrote. “Other news organizations have
handled this material differently, always checking with us prior to
publication, giving us an opportunity to respond.” (Giving us the
opportunity to edit and approve, is what he should have written.) In the
end, Fusion updated the story and posted an editorial note saying that
it had not met its standards.

OK, let me acknowledge my mistakes and provide a little further
information. First off, the Fusion story did contain a number of errors.
My name is on the story so I have to take responsibility.

Fine. None of the mistakes was intentional and I spent endless hours
prior to publication trying to ensure everything was accurate. There is
nothing more embarrassing as a journalist than having to make
corrections. I screwed up. But I stand by the story’s on-the-ground
reporting from Colombia and the conclusions about the Clinton
Foundation’s meager results there.

Second, of course I’m biased against the Clinton Foundation and the
Clintons, on the basis of evidence and reporting. I’ve never bothered to
hide my feelings, in public, on social media, or in my articles,
because I believe that all reporters are biased and readers are smart
enough to know that, and that the pretense of objectivity is itself
dishonest. What makes a journalist honest is holding all sides to the
same standard of criticism, no matter what your own views.

I’m equally biased against Donald Trump and have written a number of
critical articles about him and described him in equally vulgar and
unflattering terms. The only reasons I haven’t written about Trump more
is that I had pitches about him turned down — including one about his
revolting comments about women, which I shopped around unsuccessfully
last spring during the GOP primaries — and because I believed (and still
do) that Hillary Clinton is likely to be elected president, which makes
her a bigger target.

Third, and most important, I repeatedly sought comment from the
Clinton Foundation.This may seem like a minor matter but the fact that
the foundation lied about that shows that it not only seeks out
well-trained pet reporters as surrogates, but keeps tabs on and actively
seeks to undermine its “enemies.”

In August, when the piece was at Politico, I sent a detailed email to
the foundation, to Hillary’s campaign and to the CGEP seeking comment.
There was nothing coy about it. I wrote, in part:

I’m currently writing a piece about the foundations’
activities in Colombia, where I recently spent 10 days, and interviewed
dozens of people…I truly want to hear your side of
this story, which thus far appears to be utterly appalling. While the
Foundation and presidential candidate Hilary Clinton have effusively and
repeatedly expressed their concerns for the poor and organized labor —
and in Colombia specifically mention a deep concern for Afro-Colombians —
I found no evidence of that on the ground.

Unionists, Afro-Colombians, elected officials and impoverished
people in the slums of Bogota and Cartagena are unanimous: the Clinton
Foundation…has played no role at all in helping Colombia’s poor or even worse, it has played a negative role.

I’ve tried unsuccessfully to get comment from you in the past
about other stories but wanted to reach out once again in the hopes that
you might be able to reply to some simple straightforward questions.

In fact, this was the fifth time in the past year that I wrote about
the foundation and it only replied once, prior to publication of the
first story. Furthermore, I sought comment at the Clinton Foundation in
Colombia and at several of its projects in Bogota and Cartagena, and no
one could talk to me or provide even minimal information. (For example,
why does the Clinton Foundation run a private equity fund out of its
Bogota office? What does that have to do with its charitable efforts?)

Should I have reached out to the foundation again after the story
moved to Fusion? Perhaps, but another reporter who had been working on
the Colombia story had attempted to get comment from the foundation and
received no reply. The foundation (and the Clinton campaign) was given
ample opportunity to reply and chose not to. I have a strong suspicion
that if Thrush or Klein or Haberman or one of its other pet journalists
had asked for comment they would have had no problem.

The 2016 election has exposed like nothing in modern times the
desperate need for political reform in this country. That two candidates
of such low stature are all we have is an indictment of the system, not
the poor voters who are stuck with such dismal choices.

But we also desperately need a better media, because in this election
Trump’s voters were not understood and issues he espoused were treated
as reckless even in cases where many Americans — in fact most — probably
agree with him.

Again, I find both of the major candidates repellent and would never
vote for either. Most of my friends and family are voting for Hillary
(in despair), and I respect that; I have no intention of losing
friendships over this election because of the way someone votes.

But you don’t have to be crazy to vote for Trump. The best reason I’ve seen was recently offered by Camille Paglia, who said,
“People want change and they’re sick of the establishment…[I]f Trump
wins it will be an amazing moment of change because it would destroy the
power structure of the Republican party, the power structure of the
Democratic party and destroy the power of the media.”

If she’s correct, that indeed would be the very best outcome of this sad, sad election.

Ken Silverstein is a Washington-based investigative reporter and editor of the site WashingtonBabylon.com. He has written for Harpers, the LA Times, and VICE.

The New World Order Plan is spiritually based: it is a conflict between God and His forces, on the one hand, and Satan and his demonic forces on the other side. Anyone who does not know Biblical doctrine about God and Satan, and who does not know Scriptural prophecy, cannot comprehend the nature of the struggle facing the world today. - David Bay, Cutting Edge Ministries

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. - Ephesians 6:12

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence... Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. - President John F. Kennedy, April 27, 1961

The Bible

Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

The book in which they are embodied was first published in the year 1897 by Philip Stepanov for private circulation among his intimate friends. The first time Nilus published them was in 1901 in a book called The Great Within the Small and reprinted in 1905. A copy of this is in the British Museum bearing the date of its reception, August 10, 1906. All copies that were known to exist in Russia were destroyed in the Kerensky regime, and under his successors the possession of a copy by anyone in Soviet land was a crime sufficient to ensure the owner's of being shot on sight. The fact is in itself sufficient proof of the genuineness of the Protocols. The Jewish journals, of course, say that they are a forgery, leaving it to be understood that Professor Nilus, who embodied them in a work of his own, had concocted them for his own purposes.

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